In general, I think this Manga is a fairly good learning resource. The vocab used is, on the whole, pretty common due to its slice of life nature. But, there is still a fair amount of Shogi-specific terminology.
The difficulty is also not very consistent throughout. The character, 晴信 (Harunobu) likes to adopt a kind of antiquated speech style at times. And the difficulty goes up by a whole notch when you get to the Shogi one-page columns. These are interspersed in-between some of the chapters (there are four in total) and are written by a professional Shogi player. They introduce some aspect of the Shogi game or culture. I found them, by far, the most challenging parts of the Manga but I actually really enjoyed slowly picking them a part to decipher the meaning. You can, however, skip over them if you like because it's not part of the main story - just background context.
Entertainment
The story isn't particularly gripping but it's slow and thoughtful and I like it. I also didn't expect this going in to reading 3月のライオン, but I found reading about Shogi so fascinating. I got to learn about an interesting slice of Japanese culture whilst improving my language skills at the same time - win-win!
Language Learning
In general, I think this Manga is a fairly good learning resource. The vocab used is, on the whole, pretty common due to its slice of life nature. But, there is still a fair amount of Shogi-specific terminology.
The difficulty is also not very consistent throughout. The character, 晴信 (Harunobu) likes to adopt a kind of antiquated speech style at times. And the difficulty goes up by a whole notch when you get to the Shogi one-page columns. These are interspersed in-between some of the chapters (there are four in total) and are written by a professional Shogi player. They introduce some aspect of the Shogi game or culture. I found them, by far, the most challenging parts of the Manga but I actually really enjoyed slowly picking them a part to decipher the meaning. You can, however, skip over them if you like because it's not part of the main story - just background context.
Entertainment
The story isn't particularly gripping but it's slow and thoughtful and I like it. I also didn't expect this going in to reading 3月のライオン, but I found reading about Shogi so fascinating. I got to learn about an interesting slice of Japanese culture whilst improving my language skills at the same time - win-win!